[+]EnlargeThis case of Boilermaker memorabilia from the 1940s can be found on display in the Riddle home. Photo by Gini Davis, Creswell Chronicle, reprinted with permission.

[+]EnlargeAlice and Corolous Riddle don the welding mask and hard hat they wore while working at a shipyard during WW II. Photo by Gini Davis, Creswell Chronicle, reprinted with permission.

Women support war efforts through shipyard work

ALICE RIDDLE IS a member of
the Springfield, Ore., chapter of the
American Rosie the Riveter Association
(ARRA): women who did what
was considered “men’s work” in
defense plants, shipyards, etc., during
World War II.

Riddle, 90, was a shipyard welder
and member of former Boilermaker
Local 568 in Tacoma, Wash. She worked
at Washington’s Seattle-Tacoma shipyards
from 1941 to 1943. A shipfitter
for a year, she then became a welder
on the finishing dock “because it paid
more money.”

Marjorie Jean Thorsen, 94, was a steel
burner in 1944 at the California Shipbuilding
Company (Cal-Ship) in Wilmington,
Calif. A member of Boilermaker
Local 92 (Los Angeles), Thorsen was
married at that time to William Seineke,
a private in the U.S. Army. She went to
work at the shipyard because there was
not enough money coming in from her
husband’s Army paycheck to support
their family.

Thorsen’s brother-in-law, Bill Bollman,
worked at Cal-Ship and suggested
she take a job there to earn some
extra money. It wasn’t long before her
talent as an artist came through in her
new work as a steel burner.

“I would set the template on the steel,
burn as many as six holes in each sheet,
and then just tap each one. The circles of
steel would fall almost simultaneously
from the sheet,” Thorsen said.

Her ability to burn perfect circles in
four-inch steel came to the attention of
shipyard management, who selected
Thorsen to demonstrate her burning
skills to military personnel. The
Air Force was so impressed that they
offered her a job. But by then her doctor
was recommending that she stop
burning due to a heat stroke she had
suffered. She has been plagued by heatrelated
problems ever since.

Thorsen often talks of her days
working in the shipyard — about
salt tablets at stations throughout the
shipyard, overhead cranes that could
cut people to pieces if you got in the
way of the swaying steel, dehydration,
and burning boots. She described the
area where they worked as cavernous
— like an airplane hangar.

“This allowed the huge cranes —
which were probably about one story
high — to travel in and out on their way
with plates of steel. The plates were so
large that they would sway from side
to side as the crane traveled on tracks
through the building. One man had his
face sliced open by the swaying steel
when he wasn’t watching out for the
crane,” Thorsen recounted.

Unlike Thorsen, whose husband
served in Europe during the war, Riddle’s
husband was a certified welder
working at the shipyard where he got
his wife a job as a shipfitter. Corolous,
now 96, continued that work throughout
the war.

Mementos from that time — ID
badges, Boilermaker union buttons,
her welder’s mask, his shipbuilder’s
helmet — are displayed
with pride in the Riddle home, a
400-acre ranch in Oregon where the
Riddles moved to in the 1950s and
once farmed.

As a shipfitter, the
slightly-built Mrs. Riddle
helped carry heavy six-foot
by eight-foot templates,
laying them atop slabs of
iron that would become
parts of ships’ hulls.

“We’d punch and hammer
through the holes in the
template onto the steel, then
remove the template and chalk
where we’d marked,” Riddle
said. “Then the burners (like
Mrs. Thorsen) would burn
around the chalk marks
to cut the shape needed.
Then cranes set the slabs
into place at the dock to be
welded together.”

On the finishing dock,
Riddle tack-welded sheet metal on
ships being refitted.

“I wasn’t a certified welder,”
Riddle said. “I made small welds
to hold the pieces together ;
then a certified welder did the long,
continuous weld.”

Riddle, who worked swing shift,
particularly remembers “sometimes
getting to work up on the top deck,
where the beams came together.
Some nights, in the moonlight,
it was such a delight to be on the
top deck.”

Thorsen worked the night
shift, riding the “Red Car” home
at 3:00 a.m. (The Red Car refers to
the electric railway lines operated
for 60 years by the Pacific Electric
Railway in the Los Angeles
area.) Thorsen and her sister and
brother-in-law, Jill and Bill Bollman,
shared a home in Compton,
Calif., and worked different
shifts so they could help care for
each other’s infant. Thorsen had
a six-month-old daughter, Susan,
at that time. The Bollman’s child,
Gerry, was also six months old.

For health reasons, both Thorsen
and Riddle left their work at the
shipyards before the war ended.

“We got busy raising our families,”
said Riddle, who raised six
children. Thorsen had one more child with
her husband, Seineke — a son, Erik, born
in 1946.

Editor’s note: Marjorie Jean (Seineke)
Thorsen, one of the two women featured in
this story, passed away shortly before this
issue went to press. We extend our condolences
to her family and friends — and our
thanks to the late Ms. Thorsen for sharing
her experiences.

Excerpts from a story on Mrs. Riddle by
Gini Davis for the Creswell Chronicle are
reprinted here with permission.